Scott Driscoll, of Internet Safety Concepts, spoke to over fifty parents on the evening of Monday, March 13. A former undercover police officer who spent ten years pretending to be a thirteen-year-old named Stacy in order to catch online predators and pedophiles, Driscoll now campaigns heavily for safe practices on the internet, especially for children and teens. Taking a tough love approach, he advocated that parents both communicate with their children about internet usage and safety, but also to be hands-on in checking their phones. Driscoll then showed parents wise ways to approach settings for the highest safety levels, highlighting the critical boxes to check. New Fairfield High School Principal James D’Amico said that he hopes parents take away, “more knowledge about how these things work and what the settings actually mean,” in order to better protect their children.
Following presentations made to grades 4 through 12 earlier in the day, Driscoll spent over an hour walking through each popular app and the pitfalls that lurk in the settings, plus referenced signs that cyberbullying may be occurring to a child and the dangers of sexting. He said, in a nutshell, this work to ensure internet safety best practices are in place is about “making sure we empower our kids with the most important things to us.” He was candid that most children and definitely teens are typically savvier than their parents with technology. Driscoll also attempted to instill in parents the healthy fear that protecting their children from internet pitfalls is important in so many ways, including the perpetual digital “tattoo or footprint.” Driscoll stressed that mistakes “follow us. I wish at the end of the school year we could erase the internet and say we were starting from scratch. That would be such a dream come true.”
Driscoll explained that the first line of defense is to make your account private, which many children do not want to do because they are interested in gaining as many followers as possible. However, with an open account—and often a liberal usage of hashtags on apps like TikTok and Instagram—it’s an open invitation to the public to see everything a child is posting. While it may seem like a far-flung dream to become an influencer, have viral posts, or become “TikTok famous”, things become much murkier when these apps’ behind-the-scenes settings come into play, such as the mapping features that underlie many of them, allowing anyone to quickly pinpoint where exactly a child is, based on their post. Though the safety gains in leaps and bounds when the mapping features are turned off, online predators can often pick up clues about children from posts, say, if they are wearing a shirt with their school’s name on it. “I encourage all of us, children and adults, to be on private accounts for our personal, non-business usage,” Driscoll said, having seen the gamut of troubles that arise from open accounts.
Most social media platforms Driscoll covered, TikTok, Instagram, SnapChat, Be Real, Omegle:Talk with Strangers—the latter was by far the scariest—have age restrictions for at least 13 years of age, but children who are younger are absolutely on these apps. “If they lie about their age, they certainly are not going to get arrested for it, but they’re going to see things that aren’t appropriate for their age,” Driscoll said. Though tech companies are slowly acquiescing to the need for tighter restriction, their natural impulse is to make the privacy defaults as broad as possible on the apps, in order to build data and more accurate profiles on their users. There are also tricky scenarios in initially signing up for the apps that are not easy to navigate. For example, getting started on Instagram requires three pages of data to be populated on the user, but on each page only one or two items are actually required, which is impossible to ascertain (i.e., while they need an email address associated with the account, they certainly do not require a physical address). “Unfortunately what a lot of our young people do, with the impulsivity to get online fast, is they fill in every blank,” Driscoll confirmed. Sensitive information, such as addresses, phone numbers, links to other social media accounts, pronouns, and more can be unnecessarily shared when users could bypass the non-required information. For new users, just Google “what are the minimum requirements for X social media app and go line by line.”
One of the most frightening features is the aforementioned mapping technology that most apps have embedded. There are two tiers in place, one for users to choose to add locations and the location features in the settings. Even if the user does not tag a location or choose Ghost Mode in a post, if the settings for locations are unchecked, it is possible for followers to identify a location based on photographs alone without a need to search for it, the app offers you the location. Driscoll stressed the point that most photos are taken in the mirror in the bathroom of the child’s home.
Driscoll extolled about the deeply problematic private messaging features in almost every social media app. “If you use it appropriately, it is a fun way to communicate,” he said, however, “what makes me so concerned about it, is easy access to the camera. Here’s where Instagram, before you send it, you can decide to allow people to view it once, allow a replay, or keep it in your chat? Ladies and gentlemen, that’s Snapchat built into our Instagram messenger. And this is why kids in my programs tell me they don’t care if their parents don’t want them on Snapchat.” The biggest concern with the “disappearing images” features or employing “vanish mode” is that they do not disappear at all and can easily be screenshot or videos can be simultaneously recorded. Maybe the child “does something risqué” or “something they shouldn’t do” because they think it will disappear, but that is often not the case.
Driscoll highlighted some areas that parents should definitely look into, such as whether there is a My Eyes Only repository for photos activated in SnapChat, arguing that if photos are appropriate, they should just be a part of the camera roll. The most powerful safety features in TikTok are the settings to not let anyone download a video, stitch to the video, and to not allow anyone communicate with the poster. Driscoll has seen his fair share of fallout in the comments of videos, “They will work hours on a video and the comments are ‘this is terrible.’ And all the self esteem goes down the drain.” He also stressed that there are dangers in connecting to other users, in terms of control of the content, “I’m not a huge fan of how much content our kids are sharing because we’re losing control…there’s a new feature called FYP or For You Page that connects to potential sponsors…that’s where the hashtagging is out of control.”
By far, Driscoll’s cautionary tales were at their height when referencing Omegle: Talk to Strangers, and to a lesser extent, Be Real. These are essentially a modernized version of an old school chatroom, but with video. With Omegle, you are supposed to be eighteen to join, but it is trending with younger teens—and with random adults—and “If you don’t have your video camera running, you can’t join,” Driscoll explained. If a user doesn’t like the stranger they are talking to, they can hit next and get a new stranger, but these, overwhelmingly, are the sites that can get creepy and inappropriate very quickly. Driscoll likened these scenarios as speedy ways to lose innocence and for kids to find themselves in unsafe situations parents don’t want their children to be navigating.
In the end, Driscoll emphasized that there is a lot of good in social media—think: the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge—however there are many difficult situations and inappropriate content that children can be exposed to. He encourages open communication among parents and teens and for parents to actively handle their children’s phone to check settings and monitor usage. At his website, Internetsafetyconcepts.com, parents can find a host of information on the apps and particular settings, plus download contracts to engage in with children. An open book, Driscoll encourages parents, especially those with a child in trouble, to reach out to him at info@internetsafetyconcepts.com. “Let’s work together to get better and get stronger on keeping ourselves safe,” he said at the program’s close, “That’s always been my approach.”
By Sarah Opdahl